


Playing House

by morganya



Category: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-07-25
Updated: 2004-07-25
Packaged: 2017-10-10 13:00:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/100055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morganya/pseuds/morganya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thom wishes his house was haunted, Ted's having an out-of-body experience, and Thom's dog is ungrateful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Playing House

_ stuck out on my own again _

Lately Thom worries that the house in Southampton is going to pieces without him; he hasn't had a chance to get back there and sort things out himself for a long time. He pays a small, sweet-voiced woman named Bernadette to check on the grounds and make sure any mice haven't chosen to drown themselves in his sinks each month, but it's not the same. It freaks him out a little bit to think of his house being empty for months at a time. It feels like a waste. Houses are meant to have people in them.

Back before his life went completely crazy, he tried to fill the house with people every weekend. Dozens of people in and out, and sometimes it was guys he knew from college bringing their Land's End-clad girlfriends, sometimes it was one or both of his brothers and then his cousins and their assorted friends, sometimes it was other designers who talked shop with him while casting a critical eye over his furniture, and sometimes it was other Southampton people, and they all brought their animals so Paco could have someone to play with, and the house was always kind of a wreck afterwards but it was worth it.

If he was with someone, things were more low-key; they watched TV or went out on the lake or went to parties around town, getting back at around midnight and falling into bed with each other, sleeping in spoon position before waking to watch the sun rise. That hasn't happened in a while.

The last person to live with Thom had been named Max, who was an art dealer in the West Village, five years younger than Thom, with brown eyes and freckles and dark red hair. Max went back to live in the West Village after two years and eight months, and now they send each other Christmas cards every once in a while, just to keep in touch.

By the end, Max had gotten the recital of Thom's shortcomings down to an art form. It started with, "You never pick up after yourself," proceeded elegantly through, "You always need to be the center of attention," and finished up with, "You've never been real with me."

Max had been to therapy; he believed in the cathartic value of communication. He was open and honest; it had been one of the things Thom liked about him. For a while, Thom liked the idea of long, soul-searching talks in the middle of the night, sitting and listening while Max sorted things out. He liked watching Max's face grow content as he struggled through to the solution.

Except after a while, all talking did was make Max angrier, and nothing got sorted out, and Thom wanted more than anything to just stop listening.

At the very end, he was sitting in the kitchen at three in the morning, with Max standing with slumped shoulders over the counter, going through his performance art, and Thom wanted to say, _I won't listen to this anymore, I won't listen to this,_ and the thought struck him as being so hopelessly B-movie, William Holden drawing himself up to his full height in a pure white room with Greek columns and silk drapes, saying, _I shan't listen to this,_ to Veronica Lake and stalking out of the room. It seemed so ridiculous that he laughed, right in the middle of Max's monologue, and it was entirely the wrong thing to do.

Max turned on him, lips gone white around the edges, and said, "Can't you take anything seriously?"

Thom, still laughing, spread his hands over the table and stared at the lines in his palms. "You know, right now, that's the last thing that matters."

The last Christmas card he sent to Max was covered in tiny snowflakes, what seemed like thousands of them, and if you didn't look closely at it, you would think they overlapped each other, until you squinted and realized they were all in their own separate orbit. Thom can't remember what he wrote inside the card. He signed it Love, at any rate.

Thom just knows the house is going to pieces without him there.

*****

Ted can count the places he's lived in on five fingers, six if he's getting nit-picky. At various points in his life, he's gathered his stuff together and walked away with it, going from Columbus to Carmel to West Lafayette to New York to Chicago and then back to New York.

It's a hassle more than anything, this moving from place to place. The last move was probably the worst; it was filled with logistical maneuvering, spending what seemed like exorbitant amounts of money to make sure the house was insured and unlikely to fall apart in his absence on top of dealing with the lease and insurance of the new apartment. He spent half a day in the house trying to decide what needed to come with him and what needed to stay, and half of his life went into storage and the other half - mostly clothes, the laptop computer, family photographs - he carried to his apartment in New York, bit by bit, like an ant.

Occasionally he wonders why he's even bothering to try to keep the house in the first place. Real estate was a good investment, but the amount of long-distance upkeep it requires is exhausting. He occasionally considers putting it on the market, just taking the money and running.

Except then he always thinks about the spot in the kitchen, the one that looks out at the garden in the backyard, and he never really had the patience to spend on plants, so everything is fairly low-maintenance, herbs and perennials mainly, but in the thick Chicago summer everything turns yellow and purple, crazy patchwork colors that he used to look at while he was drinking coffee in the morning, and even after a year of being seven hundred miles away, he still can't remember it without something going tight in his throat every time.

Ted's house in Chicago is older than his apartment in New York. The pipes clank in the night and one time the oven just plain refused to work for two weeks, a refusal that cost seven hundred dollars to fix. It gathers dust in odd places. One place in his bedroom is always the warmest spot in the whole house.

The house in Carmel is very much his parents' house, filled with memorabilia of himself and his sister, and his mother keeps Bibles in every room, just to have them close by. He doesn't know what the house in Columbus looks like now; he was pretty young when they left and he supposes it's been redone by the new owners. He just remembers it as smelling of heat and peach from his mother's cooking.

His apartment in New York is white and modern, with plain clean lines. He can see the Hudson from his window, and it doesn't look polluted at all from his view, just like rippled blue-gray glass. He has a fantastic kitchen. So he's happy.

He sometimes thinks about skylines. Both New York and Chicago could trick you from a distance, make you believe that the cities were built on water. Lakes and oceans. Not much difference there if you didn't think about it. Columbus was essentially landlocked except for the rivers cutting through it like dividing lines, and Carmel was all ground and sky, two steps away from being farm country.

He tells himself that he's not allowed to feel homesick, after living in five cities. You're only allowed to miss one particular place in your life, he thinks; he can't miss more than one city at a time.

Not that he does. He never gets homesick. He doesn't feel homesick at all.

Not at all.

*****

_ the reason you call to say nothing _

When Thom hears that they've got a long weekend off (it's a production thing, an editing thing, some sort of thing anyway), he starts calling people, because it's the end of summer and he knows how beautiful the lake is at this time, and he wants to share.

Carson can't make it because he's going back up to Toronto to loop some dialogue, Jai can't make it because of the play, Kyan's meeting The Boyfriend's parents, so he can't make it, and Ted's so set in his ways that he can only say yes after a certain amount of nagging.

"You know, Ted, there's life outside New York City," Thom says on the phone. "Strange as that may sound. You know, fresh air, sunshine? That's got to be better than holing up in your place all weekend."

"I have to say, I never pegged you as the back-to-nature type, Thom," Ted tells him. A car alarm bleeps behind Ted's cell phone-distorted voice. He's out on the street somewhere, and Thom doesn't know if he's walking towards something or away from it, Ted didn't say.

"Well, it's not, like, we'll be out in a tent in the woods. You've been to my house."

"Your palatial manse, you mean?"

"Yeah, that's about right." Thom thumbs through his address book. He needs to call his assistant at the firm, to make sure she knows where he'll be, and then there are a couple of clients he needs to check in with. He should see who's going to be around when they actually get to Southampton; it'd be good for Ted to get out and socialize.

"It's been a long time since we've been out there, hasn't it?" Ted says. "Except it was all of us then, and David and Michael, and you made us all go to that godawful Malaysian place for dinner..."

"It wasn't that bad," Thom protests. "Like, my friend Cindy said that she had this really good -"

"And then we all got food poisoning from the chicken," Ted continues, as if he hadn't heard.

"I don't think it was the chicken. It could have been that crap _you_ served up at lunch, Mr. Chef, with those weird little capery things -"

"Which you ate two servings of."

"I was just checking to make sure I didn't like it."

"I'm sure." Ted laughs, his strange, restrained chuckle crackling on the line.

"I promise I won't make you get out of your comfort zone, okay?"

Ted pauses. "It's just us this time around?"

"Just you and me, honey," Thom sing-songs.

"It's almost like we're playing house, isn't it?"

Thom stops thumbing through the address book. This is something that hadn't occurred to him. "Mmm," he says, and he means it to mean whatever Ted wants it to.

*****

Ted drives out of the tic-tac-toe board of New York's streets towards the highway, watches office buildings turn to exit signs. Out of place, scrawny trees clump together along the side of the road. The route to Southampton stretches out before him in a long, clean line, and he offers a silent thank you to Thom for living in a place that's easy to get to.

Not really living, he supposes. A summer place, a weekend getaway place. He's used to thinking of Thom as being instantly at home wherever he is. The place at the lake seems as intimately connected with Thom as much as his place in the city does, and he can't quite explain how that is, because Thom's apartment is clean and modern, with big French windows and Rothkos on the wall, and the house is bathed in golden light, soft and welcoming. It's just Thom that ties them together.

As he gets farther along the highway, the road seems to widen. The landscape seems as flat as farmland, and as endless - the buildings that shoot by his peripheral vision look more like tiny blips on a radar more than actual architecture. Ted remembers being a kid, flying down to Georgia with his family, and his mother telling him as they started to land, "Look, honey, don't the cars look like ants from up here?"

Ted's thinking that the car feels like an ant right now, and he doesn't know where he figures into that equation, except maybe for the-guy-who's-having-an-out-of-body-experience-on-the-LIE. He blinks and stares past the windshield at the horizon, looking for something that will help him anchor himself in place.

He stops for gas at a Shell station near Dix Hills. The cashier doesn't seem to recognize him, which feels appropriate. He grabs a Styrofoam cup of bitter, sludgy coffee, and he swallows it as if it were medicine.

When he steps out of the station, the air feels dry and hot, and Ted wonders if he could see the road shimmy before him in the haze, as if the earth was evaporating out from under him.

Sometimes he really wishes he hadn't quit smoking.

*****

_ the reason I'm everyone's friend _

When Thom gets to the house, the first thing he does is let the dog out of the car, then he patrols the grounds. The inside of the house is hot and smells musty with disuse; Bernadette only comes in on the first of the month, and, well, it hasn't been the first for quite a while. He walks through the rooms throwing open the windows, waving his hand in front of him to clear away the motes. The dog, overwhelmed with excitement at being in a different place, chases after Thom and then his own tail before thumping down on the floor.

Thom hates the moment when he first walks in the door, before he's gotten a chance to make sure everything is still arranged the way he likes it. He's gotten used to the quick anxious twist in his stomach once he turns the knob, but it doesn't mean he hates it any less.

He'd off-handedly mentioned this once to an old boyfriend-turned-friend, said something like, "Oh my God, I hate this, I hate, like, walking into the house like this," and Paul had laughed and said, "What, do you think it's _haunted_ or something?"

And he didn't think Paul would understand, so he'd laughed, too, and said, "Yeah, I don't need to walk in and find Jack Nicholson smashing up my bathrooms." And he'd left it at that.

The truth is, Thom's always wanted to live in a haunted house. Not like _Shining_-haunted or even _Amityville Horror_-haunted, just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill ghost, so that the rooms won't feel empty when he walks into them.

It's knowing that there's nobody there when he walks in that gets to him, just the thought of the immense _void_ of his house, despite the furniture, despite the pictures and electronics and appliances. He half-expects to open the door and watch the empty space turn physical, moving and shaking like a mirage in the heat. He hates it. He _hates_ it.

"I need therapy," Thom says, and decides not to comment on the fact that now he's talking to himself.

He shakes his head to clear it and goes to turn on the air conditioning. There's no food in the house; hopefully he still has time to make a run to the grocery store before Ted gets here.

He makes up the guest room for Ted before he leaves. The linens feel stiff and crackly when he throws them over the bed, and he smoothes them with one hand, as if he could brush away the starch.

His cell phone rings; Thom, distracted, reaches for it and says, "Uhmm?" before he knows what he's doing, and then feels bad about it. "I mean, hello?"

"Hi," Ted says. "How are you?"

"I'm at my house," Thom says. "Where are ya, Grandpa?"

"Well, I just passed a road sign. Lakeland? Lakeville? Something Lake."

"Halfway there, anyway."

"You would know better than I."

"Hey, I'm making up your bed right now," Thom says. "These sheets can stand up by themselves, practically. So don't be surprised if you roll over in the night and cut yourself on a corner."

"Is this like a starch thing, or a hygiene thing?"

"Well, if I say it's a starch thing, it gives me more peace of mind. I don't know what my dry-cleaner gets up to in his off hours."

"You know, Thom, now that that image's in my head, I think I might sleep on the couch tonight," Ted says.

"Suit yourself."

"You want me to pick you up anything?"

"No, I'm going to the store in a minute. The inside of the refrigerator's like the Sahara. Any requests?"

"Just make sure there's booze." Ted suddenly sounds much more tired than he should.

"You okay?"

There's a pause, the length of a heartbeat. "I'm fine."

"Yeah?"

"I'm fine," Ted says, and Thom doesn't push him further, because he knows the sound of Ted digging his heels in when he hears it. Ted asks, "So, you don't need anything?"

"Nope. Thanks, though."

"S'all right." Ted hangs up. Thom tucks in the corners of the sheets, feeling the cotton start to give under the warmth of his hands.

At the grocery store, he crams the shopping cart full of eggs and milk and bread and fresh coffee for staple foods, beer, dark rum and vodka, the pale, glazed anise cookies that Ted likes and the chocolate shortbread that he likes. Mark, the store manager who looks much too young to be a store manager, finds out he's here and comes out to say hello, and Thom feels bad about having to cut the conversation short and get back to the house to put the stuff away. He always stays a little longer than he means to.

He's just managed to put the groceries away when the doorbell rings. Paco immediately starts barking, some misplaced impulse to protect the house, and Thom says, "Shh, shhh," stroking Paco's head until he decides there's no threat.

He sees Ted through the glass panels on the door before Ted sees him. Ted - a little rumpled by the road, shirt hanging out of his jeans - appears to be otherwise occupied with staring at something off to the side of the house. It's sometimes unnerving just how focused Ted's eyes can be. Thom wonders if he's filing the information away somewhere in his journalist's memory, any personal judgment he might have as remote and unobtainable as everything else.

Thom opens the door; Ted turns his head, eyebrows raising in recognition of his presence, crooked smile starting, and Thom says, "Hey, pumpkin," and pulls him into his arms, kissing his cheek as though he were coming home from war.

*****

Ted starts feeling more human after he's dropped his suitcase on Thom's guest room floor and stood in the shower for a few minutes, bowing his head under the stream of water. When he gets out and wipes the steam off the mirror, his reflection looks blank and ageless.

Afterwards, Thom takes him for a walk by the lake, before they start to decide what to do about dinner. The water seems surrounded by green trees and bushes that grow thinner and sparser as they walk.

"Look, Ted," Thom says. "See that big ugly-ass Colonial there?" He points at a house across the way. "I used to run into the owners at parties and stuff. They, like, got _upset_ with me when I told them what I did. Told me about how this one designer ruined their lives by leaving all their paintings crooked on the walls or something. It was the pettiest...I was like, 'You have too much money.'"

"So does this mean I can go into your house and move all your stuff around?" Ted says. "Because I've been looking forward to doing that."

"Well, I didn't say _that,_" Thom says. "But at least I won't need to blame a whole profession when I kick your ass."

Ted laughs. Thom grins at him. He picks up a flat, gray rock and skims it across the lake with an effortless flick of his wrist. Ted watches it fly away from them, barely grazing the water, until it loses its momentum and disappears neatly below the surface.

"Lucky the dog's back at the house," Thom says. "If I did this in front of him, he'd just charge into the water and try to, like, retrieve it. And he's not a retriever. I was worrying that he was going to get hillbilly teeth."

"Pirate teeth."

"Nasty, broken teeth. You ready to head back?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I guess so."

Thom throws an arm around his shoulders as they approach the front porch. "Why don't you try to get a house here?"

"I don't think I have that kind of money, Thom."

"Now you do." Thom lets him go, steps up to the front door. "You're a big famous TV star. You're the kind of person this town dreams of."

"Like you?"

Thom fumbles with his house keys, smiling at Ted over his shoulder. "Yeah. Like me."

"You've been here a lot longer than I have, Thom," Ted says.

Thom frowns, pushing the door open with his palm. The dog skitters over the floor to come greet them, barking. "Does that matter?"

Thom's friend Annika calls the house on Saturday morning and offers a last-minute invitation to a party in someone else's honor; Thom says it's for a cousin's birthday or something and Ted takes his word for it.

"I ever tell you I used to cover these things when I was still in Chicago?" Ted asks Thom just before they walk out the door. They stand in front of the mirror in the hall, tjuzing at the last minute. "Society parties. I was the anonymous man about town."

"Like the _Tatler_? Ted, I didn't think you had it in you." Thom turns away from the mirror, raising his eyebrows. "Hmm?" Thom always needs someone to look him over.

"Mmm." Ted straightens his collar. "I'm giving you a look at my dark past, Thom."

"You're a dork."

Ted slugs his shoulder; Thom laughs. "Must you always abuse your houseguests, Filicia?"

"No, honey, just you." Thom leans down to brush at his hair, then gives up. "C'mon, we're late."

Thom's friend Annika is old enough to start pretending she's younger, tall, artfully blonde, with a strong Grace Kelly jaw. Thom goes to kiss her hello and she attempts to lift him off his feet, chuckling, then pulls away, leaving her pale, nail-bitten hand on his shoulder. Ted feels like he knows her already: one of the funny, vaguely heart-broken strays that Thom cultivates, one of the benevolent lost souls who gather around him.

"This is Ted," Thom says to her. "He works with me. You probably know that, though."

She removes her hand from Thom's shoulder and offers it. "I don't believe I've..." Her accent might have been European once.

Ted shakes her hand. "Good to meet you."

Ted used to cover parties when he was on the job. He worked with a photographer; they'd circle around, counter-clockwise to each other, photographer (what in the hell was his name? It's been too long, Ted's forgotten) taking shots of the room, Ted recording scraps of conversation and working out in his head how to describe someone's dress. The funny thing was that no one seemed to notice they were there. It's easy to be anonymous at a party. Ted sees it as so politely contained: people drifting around each other in their own separate bubbles, occasionally making small talk when they brushed past someone, then drifting away again.

He still can't quite shake the feeling that he's working on a story, a funny puff piece that would run with photos of society matrons and bon vivants. It would only fill a couple of inches on the page.

Funny to think he's part of the bubble, now.

Someone brushes past his elbow, and it almost startles him. The ice in his rapidly-warming gin and tonic rattles in the glass.

"Oh, I'm sorry." It's a youngish man, a little too well put-together; even the fact that his shirt cuffs are unbuttoned and rolled over his wrists feels studied. "Are you all right?"

"Oh, yeah," Ted says. "Occupational hazard. I sometimes wish I had shock absorbers. Hi, I'm Ted."

"I know," the man says, and Ted thinks, _That's right, of course he knows._ "I'm Karl. You're Thommy's friend."

"Yep," Ted says. Thom is somewhere across the room, a large group of people circling around him in tight orbit. Thom's hands are dancing before him. _Born showman,_ Ted thinks fondly, _Crazy ringleader..._

"Annika's my cousin," Karl says. "Third cousin twice removed, if you want to get technical. I think she invited you here?"

"Yeah. That's right, it's your birthday. Happy -"

"Oh, that." Karl waves his hand. "She just told people that to get them to come. I haven't had a birthday in years."

"Oh," Ted says. "Good idea."

His brain checks out after a few more minutes of small talk, until Karl says _it was nice to meet you,_ and moves away. The group around Thom begins to break apart, drifting to the far corners of the room. It happens in slow motion, until Thom is left by himself, empty space around him like an aura.

Ted watches Thom raise his hand and start to drag it through his hair. He stops halfway through and passes his hand over his face instead; when he drops his hand, his expression is blank and removed, a thousand miles away from where they are.

Ted moves towards him without thinking about it. He reaches Thom's side and touches his shoulder, squeezing it gently. "Hey."

Thom starts like he's just waking up, then smiles and rubs his arm. "Hey."

When they leave, Thom asks him, "So, that was fun, right? You liked it?"

_It's only a party,_ Ted wants to say, _it's of no great importance,_ but the thing is, it seems vitally important to Thom that he say yes, so Ted says, "Yeah, it was fun. High society, good stuff."

*****

_ the reason you sleep with the radio on _

Thom wakes at three in the morning, not quite hungover, a thick, sour taste in his mouth. His pillow has traveled down to somewhere around his waist. He rolls over, blinking at the ceiling, and tries to force himself to go back to sleep, but it only takes two minutes before he gets bored. So he reaches over to turn on the light, and it sears into his eyes before he can remember how to work the dimmer.

He gets out of bed, almost tripping over the dog, and stumbles into the bathroom. He reaches for his toothbrush.

Thom's reflection has squinty, blood-shot eyes, hair that stands up at crazy angles, puffy malleable skin. It looks back at him curiously, as though it didn't expect him to be there.

"Damn," Thom mumbles around a mouthful of toothpaste. "I come out for a relaxing weekend..."

He really needs to stop talking to himself. There's something creepy about the sound of his own voice against the tiles.

He runs water over his face, tries to fix his hair, rolls his head until he looks more human. He thinks about going back to bed, but he's wide awake by now and doesn't care for the idea of wasting time alone in his room. He can waste time perfectly well downstairs.

He goes back out into his room. Paco raises his head as Thom shuts the bathroom door.

"Hey," Thom says, trying to keep his voice down, "Want to come downstairs with me?"

The dog sniffs at him and goes back to sleep.

"Humph. Ungrateful." Thom goes out into the hall. He turns on the light so he doesn't kill himself trying to navigate the stairs.

The door to Ted's room is open a little, and Thom stops before it, just to check on him. He can just make out the bed, and the curve of Ted's back, a small, slightly paler shadow among the other shadows. Ted always sleeps as if someone fixed him in position beforehand; he's never been a sprawler. Thom quietly pulls the door closed.

Downstairs, he goes from room to room, turning on the lights. He turns on the television too, but his brain's not really up to processing any of the images, so he just hits mute and leaves it on in case he wants to look at it later.

He thinks that it was an okay party, intimate on Annika's terms, and he thinks Ted liked it but you never could be sure with Ted. Next time around, Thom thinks, he'll plan better, so they can all be here, in his house, and everyone will know everyone else and there's no excuse not to have fun.

Thom leans over the sofa to look at the television, but the images make even less sense the second time than they did the first, so he turns it off completely. He runs the back of his hand over the sofa fabric, and it feels unfamiliar to touch it like this, like he was deciding whether or not to buy it.

Maybe he should go back upstairs and bother the dog again.

Someone clears their throat behind him; he turns and finds Ted, pale and unshaven and barefoot, eyes half-shut behind his glasses.

"Aren't we," Ted says, his voice turned slurred and gravelly, "supposed to be asleep?"

*****

_ for your whole damn life to fall _

Thom offers him breakfast, of all things, but Ted's stomach isn't awake enough for solid food. They sit in the kitchen, and Ted drinks coffee and Thom smokes; the lights make the white tile of the floor glow a pale peach.

"It doesn't bother you that it's just you here, right?" Thom says. "You glad you didn't have to fight with Kyan for the bathroom?"

"Nicer than being in the city," Ted says. "It's quiet. It's lovely."

"Mmm," Thom says, and Ted thinks he's satisfied. "What time are you heading back?"

"I don't know. Two. Three."

"_Everyone_ leaves here at two or three. You'll be in traffic for days."

"Oh. Or, you know, not two or three."

"Yeah. We should do this again."

"We should."

"I'll plan it better next time. There'll be more stuff to do."

"Thom -" Thom's eyes are shadowy and bruised-looking, and Ted wants to stroke his face and fuss over him, say, _You work too hard and you worry too much and you don't get enough sleep,_ but he's not the best person to be saying those things, considering. He just says, "You've got weed-whacker hair," leans over and flicks at a strand.

"I thought I fixed it," Thom says.

"You thought wrong, I'm afraid." Thom starts to drag his fingers through the rat's nest; Ted says, "Leave it, I think it's a lost cause."

"I thought I should say thanks," Thom says.

"For what?"

"I don't know. Coming here. Sitting with me."

"I couldn't sleep."

"Not _that,_ you ass." Thom waves his hand sharply, irritably, and drops it back on the table. "You know. Just, like...being here."

"Oh," Ted says, and then he stands up and gives Thom a hug, and he could lie and say he didn't know why he's doing it, but the truth is that Thom needs it and he needs it too, embarrassing as it is to admit. "It's all right. Thank you."

"I never can figure you out," Thom mumbles, holding on to him (Jesus, he's strong). "What you want or, like..."

"Thom," Ted says, "Half the time I don't even know."

"You're a pain in the ass," Thom says.

"Yeah, yeah. Speak for yourself." Ted strokes the top of his head. Thom's hair is tangled fleece.

Thom stands up, and for a minute Ted thinks he's going to pull away and go put on more coffee or light another cigarette, but Thom kisses him instead, soft and awkward, and it's not what he expected.

Thom is spikes and velvet, steel and cut crystal. Outside the sun is rising, and the light turns the lake to gold, the trees and bushes to vivid jungle green. Ted's arms are around Thom's waist.

"You feel like home," Ted says.


End file.
